User story mapping – plot your path to a successful product

If your Agile Project Kick-off is a journey, User Story Mapping is your guide as you move from visualising to building your product. And the sooner you start building, the sooner you can get your product in front of customers for feedback.

Get the Project Kick-off Kit as a handy 39-page PDF. Based on this blog post series, it’s been revised and expanded, giving you the tools you need to get your project off to a successful start.

User Story Mapping gives you two types of map. Firstly, the exercise itself gives you a pathway to the point that you can start writing user stories (a user story is a short description of something your customer will do when using your product). Secondly, the end result is a visual chart showing the structure of your stories. These stories and this structure will guide your development work.

The process we follow at Boost has evolved over time. It works for us because it’s a relatively quick, lightweight way of getting to the point we can launch into the development work.

We start by brainstorming every task that users will want to complete using the product. Then we organise these tasks into the order they’ll complete them in, and group them into wider goals which we then break down into pieces of work we can start developing. We can then move into the Prioritisation exercise, further developing the user story map.

An outline of the structure of a user story map

Running the User Story Mapping

If you’re running the User Story Mapping as part of a Project Kick-off you’ll already have the right people in the room: the Product Owner, stakeholders who understand the customers (and ideally some actual customers), the team who’ll build the product, and the facilitator.

Because User Story Mapping is quite complex, and a new experience for most people, the facilitation is important.

Describe the purpose of User Story Mapping, and outline the process. Because it’s complex, people might not fully grasp what’s involved initially. Don’t worry if that’s the case. It will become clearer as you get into the exercise.

Get people thinking about the product. They should already have a good picture of it in their heads from working on the earlier activities like the Vision, Press Release, Elevator Pitch and the Personas.

Brainstorm all the user tasks

This works best as a silent brainstorm. Working alone, each participant writes down on a post-it note every step the user will take through the product, from their first touch to the point they leave. You need to stick to one step per post-it. Encourage the team to think of these as actions not features. Writing them so they start with a verb is a good technique.

It can help to do this with your top personas in mind, because you should have a good idea of what they want from your product.

Encourage people to be creative and try to cover everything imaginable. You don’t want to go into too much detail about individual steps though. This part of User Story Mapping is about breadth not depth.

You’ll end up with lots of post-its. We’ve had them run full circle around the room. That’s fine, you can’t have too much information at this stage.

Stick each post-it up on the wall in the order the users will do the tasks. This gives your story map a chronological structure.

Make sure the post-its are in a straight horizontal line. You’ll have duplicates, and these should sit beside each other on the line (not above or below). This leaves more space for the next steps, making these steps easier and the resulting story map clearer.

This first line are the user tasks and they form the spine of your story map.

Group the user tasks

As a team, look for logical groupings within your line of user tasks, collecting together all the tasks that contribute to the user achieving a wider goal.

As facilitator you can walk along the line of tasks and ask where the team think the splits are between each group of tasks, and what each group should be called.

Write these epic labels on wider post-its and place them above the user tasks that the epic covers.

Make sure the labels you give the epics will be meaningful later. Keep them brief (3-5 words should do). Again, it helps if you start with a verb.

For example, if you were building a website for a movie theatre you might group user tasks into epics like this:

Browse movies – epic

See a list of all movies – user task

See only movies that are playing now – user task

Select a movie to view more details – user task

etc

Select a seat – epic

See all available seats – user task

Select seats – user task

Change your seat selection – user task

etc

Break down the epics

This is another silent brainstorm session.

Ask the team to think about everything that needs to be in place in your product to let the user achieve the goal of the epic.

Thinking of the cinema example, you might break down the Select a seat epic above like this:

Select a seat – epic

See all available seats – user story

Choose seats – user story

Unselect your current seats to choose new seats – user story

Choose new seats – user story

etc

Each of these smaller units becomes the name or “stub” of a user story. Again, it’s important these are written meaningfully. We had one User Story Mapping where someone just wrote ‘Reports’. Everyone knew what it meant at the time but later all we could remember was that it was important—we had no idea what kind of reports were needed.

Place user story stubs under each epic

As a team, post them up under the user tasks, and the wider epic, that they apply to.

If there are duplicates, choose the best and stick that up.

You should have a comprehensive map by this stage. To make sure you do, get people to walk down the line to see if there are any gaps. The beauty of User Story Mapping is it becomes easier to see if there are gaps because you’re looking not just at a list of tasks but at a visual chart that breaks down a process by time and size.

Next steps

Now you’re ready to start prioritising the user stories on your map. Once you’ve completed the Prioritisation exercise you can start writing user stories for the high priority tasks that go together to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

While complex, User Story Mapping is a key part of the Project Kick-off because it crystallises the work for the development team, getting you closer to putting your product in front of the customers.

The Kick-off Kit

This post is part of a series covering the tools and templates you can use for a Project Kick-off.